May 26, 2024

Project 3: Cloud Portfolio Report

Start Here

Print Project

You have implemented or migrated IT infrastructures in the cloud for BallotOnline. Now, in this project, you will report to the executive team, highlighting what you have done and demonstrating the financial benefits of the cloud deployment with advanced cost analyses in the cloud.

In your report, you will focus on the following infrastructure use cases to highlight some of the key investments in the cloud and their associated financial benefits for BallotOnline:

BallotOnline website

Messaging

Disaster recovery and backup

IT self-service portal

Web application (all on-demand)

The Cloud Portfolio Report will help BallotOnline’s leadership to assess important financial components and gain a high-level overview of the overall cloud infrastructure. The executive board will evaluate your Cloud Portfolio Report for the effectiveness of the total cost of ownership (TCO), return on investment (ROI), and capabilities in the cloud infrastructure for each use case.

There are eight steps to complete this project, which will take about four weeks to complete.

First, you will provide high-level information for each of the use cases (Step 1).

You’ll use that information to calculate the TCO (Steps 2, 3, and 4).

You’ll apply the TCO to the calculation of the ROI (Steps 5 and 6).

These figures will be used to create a presentation and report to justify the investments in the cloud (Steps 7 and 8).

Professionals in the Field

Transcript:

Experts in the Cloud

Transcript

[Music]

Jeff: Today, I have with me two cloud professionals.

We’ll have some discussions about cloud migrations, cloud

implementations, and what they have done in this field.

Let me start with with quick introductions.

Mo: My name is Mohammad Haque. I’m a cloud architect.

I’ve been in the industry for 15-plus years.

I got my start as a systems administrator, worked my way through development,

application development, systems development, worked in infrastructure both virtual and physical,

and have worked in private cloud/public cloud.

I have worked as a DevOps engineer at UMGC.

That’s where I got my start and eventually made my way into the cloud field here at UMGC.

Greg: My name is Greg Smith.

“Cloud evangelist” is the best description for for what I’m doing right now.

I’ve worked in education EdTech for the last 20 years, starting in system administration

and have worked myself through a slightly different track into the management and running

production environments, worked with the University of Maryland Global Campus on their large

data center migration consolidating five global data centers into Amazon regions.

– Getting Into the Field –

Mo: I actually got my start as a systems administrator, and you know, kind of went through the progression

of systems administrator, systems developer, infrastructure architect, and then actually

my first foray into into cloud was actually a private cloud running VMware architecture

and then over to public cloud.

I think has helped me in, you know, coming up with designs for a lot of migrations, you know

taking into perspective all the different teams that might need to work into you in

these types of systems and how they actually interact and work together.

Jeff: Okay, so how do you learn all that?

I mean, do you have your degree in cloud computing?

How are you learning a lot of this cloud skills?

Mo: My IT experience has been, you know, going on 15-plus years.

Most of what I’ve learned has been on hands in the workplace.

You know picking up a book, tinkering around and basically playing with the technology

to get that that firsthand experience and plugging things together and see how things work.

What Excites You About This Field

Mo: It’s pretty much because it’s ever-changing, it’s new.

You know things change very, very fast.

New things come along and … it keeps things interesting, right?

And I like getting my hands on things,and how do I bring various different pieces of

technology together to work as one to solve a problem.

I have a passion for that, so cloud allows me to do that very easily.

Greg: What I think for me, what makes me passionate about cloud and public cloud specifically,

is the ability in which it levels the playing field.

Not only kind of among the companies, and you can have smaller companies who can be

much more aggressive in development and not have to make large capital outlays and

tie up capital early.

But you also have an opportunity at the K-12 and university level for students to learn

more without having to spend more for themselves, and you have the ability for them to have

access to features and capabilities that they would never have had access to in a learning

environment for pennies on the hour.

Jeff: That’s an interesting point, because I remember when I was in a prior position,

I was managing a network architecture course. 3:547 I was teaching Cisco, and my students [were] telling me that they have to go to eBay to

buy used Cisco equipment to be able to do the lab.

And today I mean with where we are using Azure or IBM or AWS, I mean they just put in their

credit card and you said it’s pennies to the dollar to be able to go and set up a server.

Good point.

Mo: You mentioned that.

I mean, that part of my learning process was also similar.

You know, I go onto eBay, build servers myself, I’d buy networking equipment and you know

rack them in the basement putting things together.

But now you know with the cloud, I can just basically plug in a credit card number and

be able to do a lot of these things.

– Cloud Computing –

Jeff: So I invited them here today because they have really extensive experience in this field.

A little bit of background about UMGC:

As many of you know [we] were mostly an online university.

Until a few years ago, we actually had data centers around the world.

We had five data centers.

And if you come to UMGC today, if we check out our infrastructure today, we’re down to

maybe one, maybe two racks of servers.

So the rest of the servers have been moved to the cloud, and these two gentlemen here

with me here are responsible to move a lot of them to the cloud,

so I want to talk about some about that

Greg, I think you you did most of that migration.

Can you tell us a little bit about UMGC infrastructure before the migrations and where we are today?

Greg: The UMGC infrastructure was spread out across five data centers globally supporting

our worldwide student population, and when I started in 2013, we were just in, just at

the cusp of migrating everything to the public cloud and struggling with the governance piece

of it and the people piece of it, and so as time went on, we developed a plan and kicked

off in January of 2014 a six- or seven-month effort to migrate all of the data centers

into a public cloud provider.

Jeff: So we move from from having data centers [to] moving to the cloud.

Why us, and many companies are doing that?

What are some of the reasons why people are moving to the cloud?

Greg: Well, I think some of the highlights of those reasons, are the flexibility and

resiliency that you get by being in the cloud.

We were never able to achieve in any of the cloud migrations that I have done any level

of sophistication, resiliency, redundancy that we were able to very easily in the public cloud.

Jeff: So those are some things you have learned.

In the classes, in the CCA classes, so we talk about people moving to the cloud to have

those resiliencies, the redundancies.

How about some of the cost savings?

Greg: So I think it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that it’s going to be completely cost

savings or cost neutral because I think a lot of the experience that I’ve had is that

a lot of companies that neglected overall infrastructure, and as you build out in the

public cloud, you actually wind up spending a little bit more on the op-ex side versus

the cap-ex side, but you get a whole lot more redundancy and resiliency, so you build it out

in such a way where you have fault tolerance that you would never have thought out before.

So while it may not cost less, you get a whole lot more as a part of that migration.

– Cloud Computing & Migration Challenges –

Greg: I think [in] a cloud migration project, your biggest hurdles are people

and not the technology.

I think it’s the interacting with at all levels, whether it’s the executive level and trying

to convince them privacy and cost, down to the IT organization in terms of you just do

your job differently, you don’t you know touch servers—you manipulate them by a code.

I think building that trust all on the way that’s to me by far has been the hardest of

any of the components of the cloud migration.

Jeff: How about you, Mo?

Have you seen people’s perception change as you implement … the cloud.

Maybe after the first project is implemented, people now start seeing,

“Oh yeah, maybe I like that.”

Mo: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean you know the initial reaction is “Oh you know my job’s at jeopardy here.”

With the migration, they start wondering you know what what are they gonna do, “oh I’m

not gonna have a job after this,” but for the most part what I’ve actually experienced

is this actually opens doors for people, for them to be able to kind of you know move it

to the next level and offer other opportunities.

What I found was most most engineers were actually getting excited about what was available.

They were learning things on their own and then finding things to do within the cloud

that they would not be able to do before, so it kind of sparked an interest in them

to kind of you know, self-learn a lot of the newer technologies and then come back to their

managers to say “Hey, I learned something new today” or “I just heard about this

new thing that did come out, you know I think we can use this,” and then figure that out.

Greg: And in managing that process, it’s important that you provide that support to the employees

that are going through that and the learning process.

When we worked on the project together at UMGC, we had employees who had been here 30-plus

years who were used to being able to go in the basement and touch hardware.

And now we were asking to completely shift the way that they were thinking, much like

a difference between how you are an engineer or administrator, and so it’s that shift from

going to the administrator to an engineer when you go into working into the cloud.

Jeff: Interesting.

I mean there is a technical side migrating but before that there are regulations, there

are requirements, local, state, federal government requirements.

So what are some of things that you have to deal with, to work on to get to this point?

Greg: Especially when dealing with public entities, universities, education, student data,

you have to worry about things like FERPA for student data or general policy,

and law information, making sure that you’re bringing into the public cloud or the cloud

environment that you’re looking to is protected in such a way that you validate your legal

team and their concerns about that data being available.

Jeff: In general, have the federal laws [caught] up with this move to the cloud yet?

Greg: I don’t think so, and I would extend that federal laws into auditing and state

and federal auditors.

They haven’t quite gotten to the difference between a physical data center

in a cloud environment.

It’s starting to happen much more so now than in 2014-2015,

but there’s still a little ways to go.

Mo: Yeah I’ve seen that same thing even when I was doing private cloud, that audit process

there wasn’t in place or wasn’t completely understood in terms of how virtualization

in general works, and so that was one of the bigger challenges on the management side in

making a migration.

– Public, Private, & Hybrid Cloud –

Mo: With private cloud, you still fall into the same, I’ll call, rabbit holes of you know,

purchasing servers, maintaining servers, and then basically cycling out servers you know,

every what is it two, three, five years at some points, whereas with public cloud,

you do not have the overhead of managing servers or hardware or cycling those out, supporting

those hardware equipment.

A lot of your focus now can go into actually developing systems and focusing on building

your applications versus doing a lot of those backend maintenance.

That’s not to say there’s some operating things that you still need to do, things like

OS patching, things of that nature, but a lot of the more, you know like you said before

the the cap-ex items just essentially move over to op-ex

– Technical Challenges: Best Practices for Mitigation –

Mo: I think our biggest one was whether or not we did a forklift, lift and shift, versus

kind of you know having all the applications re-architected,

and while we were doing the migration.

And for us I think a lot of that was answered because, automatically answered because we

had a lot of legacy applications, and you know all those applications could not be touched

or modified in the shift, so that kind of pushed us towards doing you know sort of a

lift and shift right right into the cloud from our environment.

Greg: Yeah, I think figuring out whether what you want to do lift and shift refactor is

probably your kind of first question that you ask once you get past the policy and procedure

kind of thing.

And I think the next thing that you just need to be conscious about— it’s just jump in

just do it.

You’re gonna just drive yourself crazy if you need a plan or you continue to think of

it like your physical on-prem data center, because you can rebuild in the cloud easily.

You could not rebuild a physical data center once you’ve laid out the physical and logical

footprint to it, and so if you dive in and you find that you need to make changes.

Mo: The other big thing in in the cloud industry is the saying that you should not be afraid to fail.

You should let your stuff fail because then you actually learn from that experience and

given that there really is very minimal cost to fail in this scenario.

Being able to do that, iterate on that.

Another big thing is iteration, being able to iterate on that allows you to kind of

you know build rapidly and you know get yourself out there.

Jeff: I’ve heard many people talk about lift and shift doesn’t take the full advantage

of the cloud capability.

What do you think about lift and shift?

What are some of the plus/minus of lift and shift, for example?

Greg: So typically, lift and shift would be a one-to-one migration

of a physical server to a cloud server.

And so you’re not taking advantage of the services and redundancy and the CPU optimization

and the cost savings if you would.

But it gets you over to the public cloud and it lets you focus on refactoring at that point.

We could not have done, for example, the UMGC migration, we could not have done that by

refactoring on the fly.

We would had to do lift and shift.

We had hardware constraints, we had spending constraints, time constraints, and we just

basically lifted everything over one-to-one relationship you know with a really good migration plan,

and then began refactoring afterwards to take advantage of you know geographic diversity,

to take advantage of load balancing and redundancy, and all of those pieces.

– Memorable Moments in Your Work –

Greg: I think the one that kind of kicked off the project for us is that we spent,

I don’t know, a couple months building this fantastic migration plan.

It was really solid, you know great team effort.

We’ve built in the diagrams, the project plan, all of these pieces.

We presented them to our senior vice president, and everything’s going great.

This was like the best meeting that you’ve ever had your entire career, and you get to

the end and he says” when will it be done?” and before you can jump in and give the timeline

of one year that you agreed upon by everybody, your boss jumps in and says “six months.”

Yeah, that kind of moment in time was kind of the funniest piece of all the migration.

As we kept going, we were able to do it.

We did it end up doing it in six months and taking on additional scope

during that six-month period.

Because we had the team, we had a fantastic team working with to get that migration done.

That kind off I think set the tone for the whole project

Yeah it was like, whatever it takes.

Mo: Whatever it takes.

Yeah let’s just do it.

Jeff: I can say internally from UMGC, I mean we heard great things about the migrations.

Of course I’m coming from the IT side, but I never had that worry about moving to the cloud.

But the fact that we within a short period of time, I would say from my perspective is

less than a year, we had data centers now moving everything to the cloud.

It may be longer than that, but from my perspective, it was that short.

And we go from having, correct me if I am wrong, we have an exchange server on site

going to Google Mail.

We had file servers—I don’t even know what file server we used before, but we used to

have a local shared drive.

Now we are all moving to Google Drive, right, and then we hosted our own learning management

system and now we fully offload that to the cloud and somebody else manages that.

Again, from the end user perspective, working at the university we’ve seen that and it’s great.

So thank you for the successful migration.

That’s really why I’m also personally excited about this field.

Greg: So there’s a series of projects that went on with that.

There was the kind of software as-a-service migrations to Google to our learning management

platform to our student information platform, and migrating all of those out, and then was

the core infrastructure project.

It was a six-month run for all five data centers, a lot of sleepless nights, but it was a good effort.

Jeff: Well thank you, thank you for that.

So how about any other lessons learned from your experience in helping customers implement

or migrate to the cloud?

Mo: I guess on a technical side I’d say that not everything is in a manual.

I mean that was one of the biggest things that I learned while we’re doing the UMGC migration.

You know we had 75–78 systems or applications to migrate over.

Not all of them were documented or some of them had, you know, documentation from when

they were originally developed.

But as they were upgraded or improved or you know spun down, we had systems running that

were no longer being used but we didn’t have that documentation to indicate what was still

in use, what was current, things like that.

So the biggest challenge is being able to go out into your current environment and be

able to identify that, pull back the covers take a look at what’s really going on.

So basically being able to kind of have that broad view of “I need to understand the

application, I need to still understand servers” as part of that migration process.

Greg: I think understanding the customer perspective of those applications that we’re moving was key,

like Mohammad was saying, there was sparse documentation I think it’s good way of describing that,

but the documentation that did exist didn’t also include who the target audience was,

so understanding who is using it and more importantly how they were using it was very

important to the success of the overall project.

– The Cloud Community –

Mo: As I said, in my experience, not everything’s in your manual or there’s always something

just a little bit different that doesn’t give you quite the formula that you need coming

out of a manual.

And you know utilizing the communities that are out there, you can you know kind of crowdsource

those ideas using your reps at your cloud providers to get a solutions architect involved

to kind of help you go through your requirements and go through your proposed solution and

then offer suggestions on how to best do things.

I think those are valuable resources that you should you kind of lean on.

Greg: Yeah, the community is huge, and I think if you can’t find a solution for what you’re

looking for, you need to reexamine what you’re trying to do.

Because I think the community, especially in higher ed but even in the public cloud,

specifically the solution architecture group you know at some of the public cloud teams,

know the stuff, and if you’re trying to accomplish something that everybody is scratching their

head on, you need to look at that.

It’s much akin to as you do system migrations or solution migrations and you run into process

problems and your process doesn’t fit in their solution, well, maybe you need to look at

your process.

– How to Break into the Field of Cloud Computing –

Mo: I would say just make sure to keep updated with the technology.

This is like a very, very fast-changing field, so I personally like to read up on blogs and

follow you know the [features] that the various providers put out, you know, what new features

that they have, so I’m kind of like on top of that, not only because so that I have new

things to play with, but so I know that I am, you know, at the forefront of the technology.

Greg: Don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo in your organization.

You’ve come away with this vast set of knowledge and you leverage that as you’re working

within your organization.

And then the other piece is find a mentor, whether it’s in your organization, whether

it’s in a different organization, even if it’s one of the solutions architects in the

public cloud team that you’re working with.

Just somebody that you can learn from and spend some time with that people who are in

the industry I think you’ll find a surprisingly receptive bunch of those in that area.

Jeff: What are some of the key skills that one needs to have to be successful in this field?

We talked about one, always learning, always wanting to learn new things, but what are

other skills or competencies or maybe traits that they need to have

to be successful in this field?

Mo: I generally look for problem solvers, you know, being able to troubleshoot.

Especially with cloud migrations— you’ve done the migration and let’s just say for

example, the application is not functioning the way you expected to in the transition.

So you’re basically either working with another engineer and application engineer or you’re

looking at it yourself if you’re in a smaller organization.

You’re going in there, you’re kind of looking at logs, you’re kind of looking at operating

systems stats, machine stats to try to determine what’s going on.

So going through all those numbers and being able to kind of systematically identify,

you know, what’s working,what’s not working to kind of get to the root problem is very important.

Greg: And I guess for me is somebody who’s looking at what’s next—who isn’t ignoring

what’s right in front of them but is able to see what’s coming down the pike to better

prepare the solutions what they’re doing today for what’s next.

– The Future of Cloud –

Mo: Looking a lot of the AI machine learning, data-like stuff that’s been happening over

the past even six months, maybe a year, has kind of really changed the landscape.

Greg: Yeah, and I think you’re looking at five to 10 years and Twitter just celebrated

its 12th anniversary.

Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services is now a 20 billion dollar company is 12 years old,

so that continual evolution in the public cloud has been hard to keep up with.

But if you do look out six months, eight months, 12 months, 18 months, it’s gonna be all about

machine learning, artificial intelligence, voice assistance, like a Alexa, Google Home,

Cortana, potentially Siri, all can be very big in terms of how we interact.

Mo: And in the next evolution, you’ve already seen it is at least for a lot of engineers

they’re not going to be dealing with servers.

Everything is going serverless at this point.

So you know learning code, how to manage that code, how to deploy those codes, so more of

a DevOps focus within the cloud.

– Migration Examples –

Greg: So I think the one that comes to mind for me is a few months after we finished some

refactoring of some of the applications that we had done for UMGC, there was a large-scale

internet outage on the East Coast.

It was one of the conveying fiber connections, and so, had we been hosted still in the data

centers around UMGC, our entire student infrastructure would have been inaccessible

because of authentication.

And all the other systems behind it would have been up and running, it’s just the authentication

was not a part of it and the students could not have gotten to it.

But because we had migrated to the public cloud and we were leveraging multi-region,

we were able to seamlessly fall over to a different region and students could continue

to take classes as they would.

Jeff: So it’s seamless transition: one region falls off,

and it just rolls over service to another region.

So Mo, from your side, any stories?

Mo: I have a positive note to kind of tell you about.

As part of the migration, I was working on moving one of the key applications that runs

in the back on the back end, and after about a month of planning and working with the end

user on how the migration will take place, I stressed the fact that this would be zero

downtime for the students, zero downtime for the staff, and when we actually got to it,

I clicked the button, did the migration, essentially did the cutover, and that was it.

No real fireworks or celebration or anything, and they came back to me, “that’s it,

that’s all it was?

Really?”

Jeff: Really, that’s it.

Mo: That’s all, that’s all it was.

I mean it’s part of the design process.

I made sure that it was zero impact, zero downtime.

And I think that’s one of the things that the cloud allows us to do, right?

You know with all the resources that are available, you can kind of compartmentalize everything

and then just do the migration or the switchover.

And then as part of that migration, I got a call probably two days later asking me what

else I had done because the application was responding faster, it was performing better.

But you know, that’s the power of the cloud, is having all that resource available.

Jeff: Do we see cost-saving, though, at UMGC with moving to the cloud?

Greg: So now that UMGC is down through the refactoring process, yes.

So one-for-one migration, you won’t necessarily see a cost savings.

With the refactoring of kind of back end applications taking advantage of the elasticity of computing

or the scaling of the computing environment the storage components that you can rather

than physical storage—yes we are seeing a cost benefit.

I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but there is a significant savings

over the three- and five-year targets of cap-ex spend.

Mo: I also think every situation is a little bit different, especially when you look at

being able to consolidate a lot of services into other services,

so that might add cost savings.

It could add cost depending on how you use those services.

– Cloud Lifespan –

Jeff: Do you think cloud computing is here to stay?

I mean, do you think we will go back to companies having data centers again?

Greg: I don’t ever anticipate myself going back to the visible data center, but if you

look at the evolution of technology where we came from the mainframe, then terminals,

to high-powered computing locally.

We’re kind of going back to that kind of dumb terminal approach wherever all the computing

is done elsewhere.

I think we’re too far in at this point, though, to kind of bring the resources that we’re

all using in the public cloud into an on-premise.

I mean, just the the idea of what that would take would be ridiculous, and that economy

of scale would be hard to replicate.

Mo: I mean, there will always be data centers, there will always be, you know, racking and

stacking servers and running your own infrastructure, but not to the level that we had before.

And cloud computing in general might be redefined in a year or two years; it might be completely

different than what we are talking about today.

But it itself is always going to be here.

Jeff: That’s a good point.

I mean we’re talking the cloud.

but the big cloud provider is still running data centers.

Mo: Right.

Jeff: So, there are still data centers, so there’s still people that with that skill,

there’s still jobs out there except now a lot of companies are now using up the cloud

instead of having their own data center.

Mo: Right.

Jeff: Well thank you again to both of you for joining me here to discuss cloud computing

and cloud migrations.

For students in the program, congratulations for getting to this point of your program,

and I wish you the best. Thanks you.

Experts in the Cloud

Step 1: Review BallotOnline’s Cloud Services Offerings

You’ve now had a lot of experience working on many aspects of the cloud at BallotOnline, and you will take a look at what you’ve done in the past. In this step, you will write up how you implemented each of the use cases using the information found in the BallotOnline use case scenarios.

This is your opportunity to show your deep technical understanding for each of these systems or infrastructure. You have completed the proof of concept (POC) for each of these. You can use those as the foundation for this part of your report, but keep in mind that sometimes implementing a production environment is different than doing a POC.

Take Note

As a refresher, you may want to go back to the Project Archive to review when you did these deployments or POCs in previous courses, or you may want to use new services.

BallotOnline website

(see CCA 610, Project 4 and CCA 620 Project 3)

Messaging

(see CCA 630 Project 2)

Disaster recovery and backup

(see CCA 630, Project 3)

IT self-service portal

(see CCA 630, Project 4)

Web application (all on-demand)

(see CCA 640, Project 2)

Use the Cloud Services Offerings template to record an overview of all the services to be included in the final report. Submit your work for feedback after reading the instructions below.

Step 2: Evaluate the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator

Back when you were putting together your first presentation to convince BallotOnline’s executives to start using cloud services, you used the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to do a comparative TCO of estimated costs for on-premise versus off-premise services as part of Building a Business Case for Cloud Computing. Now that BallotOnline has deployed services in the cloud, you can conduct a more detailed analysis of the actual costs for the ongoing use of the cloud services that you implemented.

Review

Cost Estimating

Cost-Benefit Analysis

AWS’s Pricing Model

Take some time to engage in an online conversation with your colleagues to discuss pros and cons of using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator in the Discussion: AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

In the next step, you will use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to perform cost analysis.

Step 3: Conduct the Monthly Cost Analysis for Selected Use Cases

Now that you have reviewed the cost calculator, you can use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to calculate how much BallotOnline spends on AWS services each month for the selected use cases:

BallotOnline website

Messaging

Disaster recovery and backup

IT self-service portal

Web application (all on-demand)

Take Note

You may want to refer to the “Common Customer Samples” on the right of the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator for examples.

Used with permission from Amazon Web Services.

Record your results in the Monthly Cost Analysis Template and submit them to Sophia for review after reading the instructions below.

After submitting the Monthly Cost Analysis, move on to the next step to review the AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator.

Step 4: Review the AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

In the previous step, you calculated BallotOnline’s costs within AWS. However, this doesn’t give the complete picture of costs, as there are also costs outside of AWS associated with supporting the cloud endeavors. To calculate all those costs, including hard and soft costs incurred outside of AWS, you will conduct Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis.

TCO is a cost-estimating procedure that considers both direct and indirect cost and benefits such as hardware and software acquisition, management and support, communications, end-user expenses and the opportunity cost of downtime, training, and other potential losses in productivity.

There are several publicly available tools and TCO calculators available, including those provided by the cloud vendors themselves, each of which may have slightly different inputs and units of measurement for costs. In this step, you will evaluate the pros and cons of using the AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator for different AWS services.

Engage in an online conversation with your colleagues to discuss pros and cons of using the AWS TCO Calculator in the Discussion: AWS TCO Calculator.

After discussing the AWS TCO Calculator, you will move to the next step to conduct the TCO analyses for the selected use cases.

Step 5: Conduct the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis for the Selected Use Cases

In the last step, you examined the AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator. Now, in this step, you will use it to conduct the TCO analysis for the following BallotOnline-specified AWS deployment use cases, with the monthly costs that you calculated in the Monthly Costs Analysis that you submitted for review in Step 3:

BallotOnline website

Messaging

Disaster recovery and backup

IT self-service portal

Web application (all on-demand)

Use the TCO Analysis Template to record your calculations and submit them to Sophia for feedback after reading the instructions below.

After submitting the TCO Analysis, you will move on to the next step, in which you will analyze return on investment.

Step 6: Conduct the Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis for the Selected Use Cases

In the previous step, you calculated the TCO for the selected use cases. In that analysis, you sought to understand the complete cost of cloud expenditures by looking at both the purchase and additional costs of operation both within and outside of the cloud vendor.

Now you can continue your analysis by performing a Return on Investment (ROI) analysis, which focuses on costs versus benefits of our investment in the cloud. A favorable ROI will demonstrate to the executives that the migration to the cloud has been a good investment for BallotOnline.

Use your TCO calculations from Step 5 to conduct the ROI analysis for use cases over the next three years:

BallotOnline website

Messaging

Disaster recovery and backup

IT self-service portal

Web application (all on-demand)

Use the ROI Analysis Template to record your ROI analysis for these AWS deployment use cases and submit them to Sophia for feedback after reading the instructions below.

After submitting the ROI analysis, you will move on to the next step, where you will create slides for Sophia to present at the executive meeting.

Step 7: Create Presentation Slides Summarizing TCO and ROI Results

Sophia is preparing for the presentation of the financial results to the executives. However, she knows the executives don’t want to go over the entire portfolio at the meeting, so she will concisely highlight the the real numbers of how the costs and value can be derived from BallotOnline’s use of cloud services.

Create a brief PowerPoint or Google slide deck (one to two content slides) summarizing your TCO and ROI analyses, and submit your materials to Sophia after reading the instructions below.

After submitting the presentation slides, you can move on to the last step of the project to write your final cloud portfolio report.

Step 8: Write the Final Cloud Portfolio Report

The Final Cloud Portfolio Report will be provided to the executives at the meeting for their future reference. This report will provide a comprehensive cloud TCO and ROI and should be between 14 and 16 pages in length.

Use the Advanced Cloud Portfolio Report Template to write your Cloud Portfolio Report and submit it after reading the instructions below.

Check Your Evaluation Criteria

Before you submit your assignment, review the competencies below, which your instructor will use to evaluate your work. A good practice would be to use each competency as a self-check to confirm you have incorporated all of them. To view the complete grading rubric, click My Tools, select Assignments from the drop-down menu, and then click the project title.

1.1: Organize document or presentation clearly in a manner that promotes understanding and meets the requirements of the assignment.

1.5: Use sentence structure appropriate to the task, message and audience.

1.6: Follow conventions of Standard Written English.

1.7: Create neat and professional looking documents appropriate for the project or presentation.

2.5: Develop well-reasoned ideas, conclusions or decisions, checking them against relevant criteria and benchmarks.

3.1: Identify numerical or mathematical information that is relevant in a problem or situation.

3.2: Employ mathematical or statistical operations and data analysis techniques to arrive at a correct or optimal solution.

3.3: Analyze mathematical or statistical information, or the results of quantitative inquiry and manipulation of data.

5.1: Evaluate the business IT needs of an organization.

5.2: Propose strategies the organization can employ using cloud solutions to enhance organizational effectiveness.

5.3: Evaluate cloud adoption as a viable solution based on cost benefits and desired outcomes.

9.5: Design virtualized network infrastructure to meet business needs.

9.6: Design cloud storage infrastructure to meet business needs.

10.1: Develop and implement cloud metering system.

10.3: Configure cloud management tools and software.

10.4: Configure cloud orchestration and automation software.

10.5: Configure service catalog software to support various user’s needs.

10.6: Configure a private cloud infrastructure using industry leading software.

10.7: Configure a public cloud infrastructure Project 3: Cloud Portfolio Report